Delegate
It would be silly to work hard and put a great team in place without empowering team members to make decisions.
Shami is a firm believer in delegation, and he now looks at himself more as a coach whose job it is to make sure departments are communicating with each other.
“Delegation doesn’t happen overnight in my opinion,” he says. “It’s a process. It’s a gut feeling that you would know that this person is capable and you give them responsibility and then a little bit more responsibility. Some people can do more than one job at the same time. Some people can work at one thing at a time. Some people can work at 10 things at a time.”
Unless it’s clear from an employee’s background that he or she is ready for a certain task, you don’t want to start delegating responsibilities right away. For example, if it’s an engineer who was brought in because of a certain skill set, you have to let him or her do the job that he or she was hired for right away.
However, for the most part, waiting 90 days is what has worked best for Shami.
“I never would have somebody who comes to run the operation who did not know the background of the operation,” he says. “You try and get them to the basics and build on it. You’ve got to have a base to build on it. You can’t just meet someone and delegate a job to them.”
For example, if you’ve hired someone in a marketing role, even though he or she may have succeeded in the past, that person isn’t a sure thing to succeed at your company.
“They need time to understand the company,” he says. “Every company has their own culture and their own thinking and their own mission. So, you need to understand, anybody who comes to a company starting to change things, they will never make it and never succeed, because people first are going to be afraid of change and they’re not going to succeed in that. They will not get the support.
“You need to get with the people, know the people, understand the culture, understand the people, understand what they are doing, and it takes 90 days to really understand company culture at a job.”
Once you delegate a task, don’t go behind the employee’s back to monitor progress.
Shami will check in with the new director or supervisor directly to get a read on how they are progressing. While he wants to leave the new supervisor room to work, Shami asks them not to change anything until they are comfortable with the culture. You have to be hones
t and upfront in these conversations if you want the new employee to succeed.
“We try to be as transparent as possible,” he says. “I always give everybody advice, ‘Please don’t go make changes. Monitor the department, know the department and let’s agree what changes we need to do before we get into that.’”
